Business Intelligence
What is Business Intelligence?
Business intelligence (BI) comprises the strategies and technologies used by enterprises for the data analysis of business information. BI technologies provide historical, current and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of business intelligence technologies include reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, process mining, complex event processing, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics.
Business intelligence (BI) is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to turn your unrelated sources of data into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights. Whether your data is a simple Excel spreadsheet, or a collection of cloud-based and on-premises hybrid data warehouses, BI lets you easily connect to your data sources, visualize (or discover) what’s important, and share that with anyone or everyone you want.
Some elements of BI are:
- Multidimensional aggregation and allocation
- Denormalization, tagging, and standardization
- Realtime reporting with analytical alert
- A method of interfacing with unstructured data sources
- Group consolidation, budgeting and rolling forecasts
- Statistical inference and probabilistic simulation
- Key performance indicators optimization
- Version control and process management
The key general categories of BI applications are:
- Spreadsheets
- Reporting and querying software: applications that extract, sort, summarize, and present selected data
- Online analytical processing (OLAP)
- Digital dashboards
- Data mining
- Business activity monitoring
- Data warehouse
- Local information systems
- Data cleansing
Except for spreadsheets, these tools are provided as standalone applications, suites of applications, components of Enterprise resource planning systems, application programming interfaces or as components of software targeted to a specific industry. The tools are sometimes packaged into data warehouse appliances.